Bruce Springsteen didn’t need to spend seven years writing an autobiography. Many of his long-term fans will know fromhis albums the story of a young, raw, Bob Dylan-wannabe morphing into a dreamer looking to run away toward adventure, only to have those dreams crushed by adulthood, nerve-wracking bouts with mental health and a broken marriage.

But in Born to Run, Springsteen pulls up to the curb in his 1960 Corvette, waits for your screen door to slam and invites you on a ride through his history. Together, you’ll cruise along Thunder Road, into the badlands, past the darkness on the edge of town, down to the river and into a tunnel of love. The journey, like one of his four-hour concerts, may have points of familiarity, but it’s the deep intimacy and connection crafted with his audience that still leaves fans wanting more.

From its first passages, it’s clear ghost writers are absent from this effort. The voice Springsteen found years ago in his music — the one that connects to a blue-collar audience — is the same one that tells this story. Nearly two-fifths of the book is devoted to explaining his modest upbringings and why they continue to influence him.

Early on, Springsteen sets up his father, who was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, as the antagonist of the story. Douglas Springsteen was a man with “the power to not love,” who embodied the “possessive face of Satan” when he frequently tore the house apart in a drunken rage.

Springsteen explains their relationship best by remembering when his father taught him to box one night when the fighting became real.

“And then he threw a few open-palmed punches to my face that landed just a little too hard,” Springsteen writes. “I had sensed what was being said: I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment.

“When my dad looked at me, he didn’t see what he needed to see. This was my crime.”

Through his teen years, Springsteen keeps the reader’s interest by finding his inner child and letting that voice spill out on the page. It’s all about girls, girls, girls — and trying to win them over on a dance floor populated by nuns trying to manage the hormones sparked by watching Elvis Presley and The Beatles on TV. He tells you about his sexual experiences as if you were a classmate he was speaking to about it at school the next day.

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That voice continues to evolve as the man does. In his early 20s, he writes like the hippie living homeless and scavenging for food on the beaches in Asbury Park that he was. Later on, he turns into a rockstar, focusing on his music and creative spark. Springsteen then evolves into a middle-aged father and eventually into an old man who worries about his body on tour and constantly reminds readers there were “NO CELLPHONES” in his early days.

Much of his musical work embodies the stories of the working-class man without a penny to his name, and Springsteen had plenty of experience to draw from — even after he had signed a record deal. In one desperate situation, he made it to New York on his last dollar — literally. One of the most embarrassing, yet light-hearted moments of the book has The Boss trying to pay a toll into New York using 100 pennies. When one was revealed to be Canadian, he stopped traffic to dig through the cushions.

Because of old debts, dirty, binding contracts and multiple visits from the taxman, Springsteen wouldn’t be financially stable until early 1982, seven years after the smash-hit Born to Run album.

The Born to Run to Born in the U.S.A. years are the most riveting and make up the core of the book. Boosted by the imagery of women, cars and deafening guitars, Springsteen makes you long to experience the open road and the freeing feeling of always being on the run, from tour to tour, town to town.

But even some of his most-fabled work is remembered with critical eyes. He recalls throwing the final cut of his masterpiece Born to Run album into a swimming pool in front of a panicked and overworked Jimmy Iovine in 1975, and thinking that his iconic sleeveless shirt, bandana and jeans look sported during his Born in the U.S.A. album and tour in the 1980s was “gay.”

Despite his intimacy in the book, Springsteen admits he didn’t tell “all.” He glazes over moments of tension in the E Street Band and the collapse of his popularity in the 1990s.

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If there’s a fault in the book, it’s that he steps on the accelerator and weaves too quickly through the prime years of his life. Later on, he takes his foot off the gas during an inexplicable entire chapter devoted entirely to horses. It’s one hell of a pit stop.

When Springsteen was “off the road, life was a puzzle,” he writes. “Without that nightly hit of adrenaline the show provided, I was at loose ends, and whatever it was that was always eating at me rose up and came calling.”

There were multiple bouts with depression, he reveals.

It first strikes during one of his many cruises around the country in the 1980s when he sees couples dancing at a fair. They look like they belong and he’s always on the run. Springsteen is emotionally and painfully vivid when describing his mental illness.

“I want to cry, but the tears won’t come,” he writes. “Worse, I want to go in the trunk and get the f—king teddy bear.”

It again rises to the foreground in his 60s, after losing beloved sidekick and saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Springsteen would cry at the sheer mention of the name “Clarence” or even at his inability to find his car keys.

“Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness,” he writes. “All was lost.”

His marriage to Julianne Phillips broke down because of similar issues with anxiety, and he regrets his handling of the separation “to this day.” Many of his other “relationships” with women were thrown away because of his inability to settle down and bring them into his troubled mind.

One relationship that doesn’t end in a broken state, however, is the one with his father. In a tear-jerking scene, Douglas drives from Los Angeles to New Jersey just to talk with his son.

“Suddenly, he said, ‘Bruce, you’ve been very good to us … And I wasn’t very good to you.’ A small silence caught us.

In the end, when Springsteen brings his Corvette to a stop and the journey together is done, the reader feels as uncomfortable as the rockstar during his time away from the road. But like his multiple trips across the country, the one through his life story is one you’ll want to take again, just for the high of being on the road with him.

So Mary climb in, it’s a town full of losers and we’re pulling out of here to win.